About The Leap Labs

A team devoted to the UX & UI needs of lean start-ups through all phases of their product life-cycle.

The Leap Labs was formed off the 2013 success of our Skyhigh Networks engagement. We realized that Enterprise Software could no longer ignore the User Experience attentions devoted to Consumer Software and that a user centric design programme could make the difference between two applications competing to solve the same problem.

We bring user centric application design principals, rapid application prototyping and beautiful user interfaces to our start-up customers in the same way we would bring it to large organisations.

Engagement Strategy

Start-up engagements are much different than other design engagements and need a different methodology to be successful. We usually engage in start-ups during the Seed or Series A stage where there are a small group of top engineers working for several months without a visualized product or light-weight visualization by the engineers. Decision-making chains are small and at this point the founders and engineers are representing a product manager and the users of the system.

We engage by embedding ourselves into this team physically at their location and through a series of whit-board workshops identify the top Use Cases of the product. In parallel we begin designing the UI look & Feel.

Once a full set of Use Cases are decided on, we can then identify the set as the Product MVP. Use Cases are prioritized and then in Use Case Workshops, are broken down into User Journeys.

User Journeys are prototyped using the developing UI Design and towards the end of the engagement, User Journey prototypes are considered High-Fidelity and a 1:1 representation of the product.

At the end of the engagement we document all Use Cases and User Journeys, provide all designs in native Sketch files and Zeplin files for rapid development, create any custom icon fonts for use and of course are always available to answer questions during development.